Experimental and FE Study on Impact Strength of Toughened Glass–Retrospective Approach

Due to the high cost of experiments commonly performed to verify the resistance of glass elements to impact loads, numerical models are used as an alternative to physical testing. In these, accurate material parameters are crucial for a realistic prediction of the behaviour of glass panels subjected to impact loads. This applies in particular to the glass’s strength, which is strictly dependent on the strain rate. The article reports the results of an extensive experimental campaign, in which 185 simply supported toughened glass samples were subjected to hard-body impacts. The study covers a wide range of glass thicknesses (from 5 to 15 mm), and it aims to determine a critical drop height causing fracture of the glass. Moreover, a 3D numerical model of the experimental set-up was developed to reproduce the experiments numerically and retrospectively to determine the peak stress in glass that developed during the impact. Based on the results of numerical simulations, a load duration factor of 1.40 for toughened glass for impact loads is proposed. In addition, the paper includes a case study to demonstrate the use of the modelling methodology and results of the work on a practical example of an internal glass partition wall.

Exploratory Finite Element Analysis of Monolithic Toughened Glass Panes Subjected to Hard-Body Impact

The paper reports the results of an extensive experimental campaign, in which simply supported toughened glass samples with dimensions of 500 × 360 mm2 and three thicknesses (6, 8 and 10 mm) were subjected to hard-body impact. A steel ball (4.11 kg) was released from different drop heights, starting from 10 cm above the sample and increasing by 10 cm in each step until glass breakage occurred. In this way, for all samples a critical drop height (causing fracture of glass) was determined. Experiments were carried out for 35 samples for each thickness; thus 105 samples were tested in total. A 3D numerical model of the experimental setup was developed using the commercial finite element analysis (FEA) software ABAQUS and Implicit Dynamic solver. The numerical study was aimed at numerical reproduction of the experiments and determination of the maximum principal stress in the glass that occurs during the impact. To reduce the number of FEs and increase the computational efficiency of the simulations, only a quarter of the nominal geometry with appropriate boundary conditions were modelled. The simulations were performed for a given weight of the steel impactor, glass thickness and the corresponding critical/breaking drop height found in the experimental campaign. In this way, an impact strength of the toughened glass was retrospectively evaluated. The simulations were used to investigate the impact history in terms of stress in glass, acceleration and velocity. Moreover, the resulting history of impact force was determined.

Digital image processing methods for the evaluation of optical anisotropy effects in tempered architectural glass using photoelastic measurements

In the present paper, optical anisotropy effects in architectural glass are evaluated using digital image processing. Hereby, thermally toughened glass panes were analyzed quantitatively using a circular polariscope. Glass subjected to externally applied stresses or residual stresses becomes birefringent. Polarized light on birefringent materials causes interference colors (iridescence), referred to as anisotropies, which affect the optical appearance of glass panes in building envelopes. Thermally toughened glass, such as toughened safety glass or heat strengthened glass, show these iridescences due to thermally induced residual stress differences. RGB-photoelastic full-field methods allow the quantitative measurement of anisotropies, since the occurring interference colors are related to the measured retardation values. By calibrating the circular polariscope, retardation images of thermally toughened glass panes are generated from non-directional isochromatic images using computer algorithms. The analysis of the retardation images and the evaluation of the anisotropy quality of the glass is of great interest in order to detect and sort out very low quality glass panes directly in the production process. Therefore, in this paper retardation images are acquired from different thermally toughened glass panes then different image processing methods are presented and applied. It is shown that a general definition of exclusion zones, e.g. near edges is required prior to the evaluation. In parallel, the limitations in the application of first-order statistical and threshold methods are presented. The intend of the investigation is the extension of the texture analysis based on the generation of Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrices, where the spatial arrangement of the retardation values is considered in the evaluation. For the first time, the results of textural features of different glass pane formats could be compared using reference areas and geometry factors. By reduction of the original image size, the computation time of textural analysis algorithms could be remarkably speeded up, while the textural features remained the same. Finally, the knowledge gained from these investigations is used to determine uniform texture features, which also includes the pattern of anisotropy effects in the evaluation of thermally toughened glass. Together with a global evaluation criterion this can now be implemented in commercial anisotropy measurement systems for quality control of tempered architectural glass.